Toad Stools

I know almost nothing about toadstools and mushrooms. I can't tell the different. I think all of these are toadstools. My understanding is that toadstools are poision as are some mushrooms. And a few mushrooms are eatable. When you can't tell which is which do what I do; just take photos of them. We have had quite a few different kinds in our lawn with all the moisture we have. Each seems to be different from the next. As most are small I end up taking photos of them looking down on them. The first photo shows the stems on these two and next pic is of the same two looking down on them. 

This one was still full of water from a recent rain. They come in all kinds of colors. Off white, rust red, orange and even black.

And some are ragged on the edges.

This one looked like a horseshoe crap, but the next day it looked like a plop of cow poop.

Butterflies

I have seen lots of butterflies this summer. Every time I go outside seems like I see at least one. They range in from a half inch so up to about 4 inches in size.  They seem to come in all colors. We have large ones that are mostly a rusty red color. There are a lot that are mostly black with like an iridescent blue or purple on the winds that are really pretty. There are small ones in almost white, to off white, to light green, to yellow, and orange. I have tried and tried to get photos of these flighty critters but they are very suspicious of anything that gets near them. About 3 feet is usually as close as I can get to those that are sitting still but most I see are on the fly. This little guy lit on a window shutter.

I got one of the same kind on the edge of the bird bath.

 The white spot in this photo is a small white butterfly.

Finally a butterfly that didn't fly away.

Oh, So Different

Since we have moved to Kentucky I find my days so different from what they were in New Mexico. A normal morning in New Mexico meant being woke up by bright sunlight about 6 am. In Kentucky I never see the morning sun until about 9 am or later. Before that it is usually foggy or if I am lucky just hazy. But that may be because we live so close to the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers. I hope it isn't that way everywhere in Kentucky 

This photo is off the road I live on in the early morning. You can barely see the trees. 

In New Mexico I would feed horses first thing in the mornings with a snack in late afternoon and a final feed at 9 pm. I, also, watered horses, and made sure my trees and plants were watered as well as the dogs, cats, wild birds, rabbits, coyotes and the local bull snake. Everything always needed water. 

New Mexico cholla cactus.

Tumbleweeds grow regardless if they have water or not. Then they blow around a pile up against anything that stops them like our wire fence. 

Only a few kinds of wild grass grow in the desert and don't last long. Large clumps of sage brush are everywhere. 

In Kentucky trees are everywhere as is grass and all kinds of green growth. This is the road I live on that was fog in the previous photo.

Another photo of the road that is almost a one lane road. 2 cars can pass on it if they are careful. This is a normal residential road here. They are narrow but paved unlike the sand, and caliche dirt road we had in New Mexico if you lived outside of a town. Powder dry most of the year. 

When I grew up if you said you were growing beans on your farm you meant pinto beans. Here in Kentucky you mean soy beans like the field of them next to my property. 

In New Mexico you never say a deer unless you were way up in the mountains. On the desert is was mostly rabbits, rock squirrels, birds, coyotes and sometimes a badger or prairie dog. Here in Kentucky the deer are everywhere. We see them in our yard and along our road and even in the middle of towns. There are also, raccoons, possums, skunks, and a birds. 

As much rain as we have here I still have to water the plants I have growing in containers once in a while. 

Evening on the desert usually brought bright sunsets. I am glad we have some nice sunsets here in Kentucky as well. The sunset photo above is New Mexico and the one below is Kentucky. 

Blending Days

It seems like one day blends into another day, which blends into another day, and the next day blends into another and then all days seem to be the same. And then I wonder where all the days went to.

Today

Today I was greeted by some of the sunflowers I grew in my small flower bed. 

There was some big, beautiful pumpkin blossoms.

 This afternoon I found another wild flower that I hadn't seen before. Small deep, purple, shaggy blossoms on tall stalks, about 3 feet tall.

The purple flowers were on the edge of the neighboring soy bean field.

I ended the day by taking my turn at mowing the grass. Hubby found my camera a took a few pics of me. 

Are We Winning?

The War of the Wasps is still on.We will win this war. (I hope.) I did take a few photos of the paper-like nests that the nasty creatures make. They like to nest under something that will protect them from wind and rain. They started out mostly in the old sheds on our property. As seen in these first two photos the nest is under the 2 x 4 wooden brace. There were some up higher but most were about 4 feet up. Just low enough they were hard to see unless you bent over. In the first photo you can actually see a wasp on the bottom of the nest. The nest is made our wasp saliva which hardens into a paper-like stuff according to what I read. They leave holes in the nest where the queen lays an egg that develops into a larvae that is feed by the adult worker wasps. After cleaning out these nests in the shed the wasps decided that the front porch would be the place to live. Right around the front door. They moved into every tiny crevice they could squash into. Behind the fake shutters they were starting to build a nest. Behind the porch light. And behind the door frame. I got stung while spraying the porch for them. Lee sprayed and sprayed and thought they were gone only to find one going behind the porch light again today. 

 These are the two sheds that the wasps were living in.

This shed is the first one we have finally finished in cleaning out. I wish I had taken a photo of it with all the stuff the previous owner left. It was so full you could not get into it. Boxes and boxes of the cheapest, and creepiest holiday decorations you can find at all the dollar stores. Then the mice had made there homes in the stuff. Boxes of old stereo equipment, old clothes, books (even
Bibles and she professed to be so religious). Some of it we refused to look into it looked and smelled so bad we just put it carefully in large plastic bags. And hoped the bags didn't break. All of it had to be pulled out and put our for the trash truck to take.

This photo is of the second shed that we have still been working on. Not as many mice here but a lot more wasps. There were stacks and stacks of old metal curtain rods. I can't find any kind of recycle place close by that takes metal, or any kind of recyclable stuff or I would have hauled the curtain rods to them. I didn't want to use them as they were rusted and yucky from being in there for who knows how many years. We did keep a snow shovel that we don't think we will ever need to use if last winter was any example. Found a fishing rod that might be usable if we ever decide to go fishing (I won't.) A couple of pipe wrenches, (so that's why the plumbing under the sinks is so crazy.) and a gas can and what we hope are spare tires for the ride-on lawn mower that she left. It was the only thing she left that was worth anything. That is after Lee bought some new parts and worked on it to get it working again. And no the mower was not in one of the sheds. It won't fit in one even after they are cleaned out. It sits on the carport. 

War of the Wasps

🐞Most people seem to bee terrified of insects, especially bees and wasps. If you have ever been stung by one, and most of us have, then you know why people are so afraid of something so small. I have always found most bees and wasps fairly easy to get along with if you followed a few simple rules. My mom taught me a long time ago that if you were careful and most importantly didn't slap and swat at bees they usually wouldn't bother you. If left alone they will just go on their way to the next flower or where ever they might be going. Mom showed me that you could very gently pet a bumble bee in the cool of an early morning while the bee was still in a flower where it had spent the night. At that time they are usually still to cold to be much of a danger. Since we lived mostly in the desert where it gets cooler at night in the summer than it does in the southern climates I don't know if this would be a wise thing to do in say Florida, or even where I now live in Kentucky.
      But wasps, yellowjackets, and hornets are a totally different insect. Every where I have lived there have always been bees and wasps, but not excessively. Here in Kentucky it seems to be a different story as far as the wasps and bumblebees are concerned. Everyone must have problems with wasps as the stores have large display areas of all kinds of sprays to get rid of them.
     The house we bought a few months ago has two small wooden sheds in the back. We thought they would be great for storage of things like gardening tools, and things we don't use very often like holiday decorations. When we looked in them before buying the property we saw they were full of 'junky stuff'. We never expected that the previous owner would leave all of the 'junky stuff' for us to have to dispose of.
    It was still winter when we started the project of cleaning out the sheds.We saw some old wasp nests but no wasps, so we didn't think to much about them at that time.
    We weren't surprised to find that they were full of mice. Our property is right on the edge of a large, wooded area with soy bean fields across the road from us. I guess no one had been into these sheds and done anything with what was in there in many years. The mice had found the boxes of Christmas, Halloween, and Easter decorations wonderful homes. They had shredded boxes of all kinds of papers, photos, books, old clothes and who knows what all else into into nice little mouse beds where they had raised many generations of mouse families. The sheds provided shelter and the woods and fields provided food.
    We tackled the project with long pants and long-sleeved shirts, with the addition of gloves, hats and face masks. We watched as mice ran out of boxes and usually under the sheds (they are raised up on wooden blocks about 6 inches tall.). A few times we had to jump out of the way to keep a mouse from climbing up our legs. You had to feel a little bit sorry for the little critters as they had lived safely there so long and now were having to go out into the big. wide world.
   It was early spring when we started cleaning the sheds in earnest but it wasn't long before the weather warmed and we discovered we not only had mice in the sheds but lots and lots and lots of wasps and a kind of very aggressive bumble bee.
    The mice, time and weather had made a large, shredded pile of what looked like cloth, paper, and maybe foam from some sort of pillow or cushion. The bumble bees were using that for a nest. It was at that time that I was stung by a bee on the side of my face. A bee that was very mad that something was attaching it's home and babies (larvae). Yes, it hurt. And I had a large bruse for some time. I used  an ice pack, and some sort of spray for insect bites that I had in the house followed by a paste of baking soda and water. Like Mom had taught me. Hubby managed to use a snow shovel to pick up the whole mess and put it into a large plastic bag. With more spraying we were not seeing any more of the bumble bees.
     But wasps were a different story. We would spray them and wait a few days a do a bit of work. With the additional problems of rain, rain, and more rain, and then some sickness, followed by hot weather that was a lot more humid that we had ever worked in it seemed as if we would never get finished cleaning up those two sheds. Finally one shed was cleaned out, washed out with a strong spray of the water hose and allowed to dry.
      While we were working on that shed the wasps had really been at work making their round, paper-like nest with holes in them for the baby wasps to grow in. We sprayed again. (we wondered if we should invest in the companies that make the spray). I wonder why I didn't think to take some photos of the sheds and the wasps. I usually take photos of everything.
      And let me say I do not like using any kind of chemical in my house or yard. In the house I use vinegar and baking soda to clean with. Worse case I might use some Lysol.
      I raise my share of flowers and vegetables in my yard each summer and I do all of it organically. I have always liked the bees and other insects that pollinate my flowers. I prefer to use horse manure for fertilizer and if I have insects that damage my plants I find another insect that will get rid of the bad one or else pick them off and destroy them by hand. I find ladybugs are great to eat aphids, and only thing that can be done for tomato worms or squash bugs is to pull them off and kill them.
    The only thing I use the chemical sprays for is the wasps.
So now we are working on the second shed. The one with the most wasps in it. We have sprayed some more and we can't get rid of all of them. It makes me wonder if the spray doesn't get in to the nest where the queen and all the babies are. I have read about wasps on the internet and found out that although all the worker wasps die when the freezing weather comes, the queen will hibernate and over winter under some leaves in a sheltered area to start the colony over the next spring. There are several different kinds of wasps in Kentucky and as bad as these are they aren't as bad as the hornets and yellowjackets. But those are not so apt to nest in sheds and under the eves of houses. Another thing to remember is that a honey bee can only sting once and then it dies. A wasp can sting and sting. If stung you need to check the sting to make sure the stinger is not still in you. If it stays it can cause an infection. The wasps can sting multiple times but they can also leave the stinger in you.
   I was stung the other day before I realized there was another nest in the shed. I was stung once on my right hand and twice on the left hand. I ran cold water on my hands. Used an ice pack for a few minutes while my husband made a baking soda paste. After having the paste on the sting areas for about an hour the pain began subsiding. By the next day I hardly knew I had been stung.
   But I was one of the lucky ones. Many people are highly allergic to the sting of a bee, wasps, or bite of a spider or the large red ants that hurt so bad. If you have been lucky enough to never have been stung or bit and then you should be very careful if you are stung. If you have any problems get medical attention right away. If you have a child stung watch them for any signs of problems. Please. I have a friend who is very allergic to bee stings and has to get to a doctor right away if stung. I have heard that that people die every year from bee stings.
   The second shed is about half way cleaned out. There are dead wasps all over the floor. And a dead wasp can still sting you if you touch the stinger. We will keep working on the shed. We will win this war.